The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Bikes and canals are everywhere in Amsterdam, so we walked along numerous canals and avoided getting run over by many bikes. I think it’s great that bicycles are a common form of transportation for all sorts of people. The architecture is fascinating to see, especially along the canals where the houses were built very skinny since taxes were paid by the canal-front property used. So you have very thin and long houses, and not always standing straight either. In addition to walking around quite a bit, we have seen the Van Gogh museum (you can see the brush strokes in his paintings), the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the red-light district on a crowded Saturday night, and I saw the Heineken Brewery museum where you get 3 beers and a bottle opener with the entry fee.
 

The other day, Anne and I took the opportunity to try out the slides at the Tate Modern. They give you a cloth to sit on with a bag at the bottom for your feet to go into, which is good, because it probably helps you slide better. But our tip for those who want to slide faster (which is fun) is to only have your butt touch the slide, not your legs and back. There are some good photos of the slide on the tate.org.uk site, but here are some of us. I never knew art was so much fun!

Microsoft and The British Library have teamed up and created something very cool: You can flip through very old and unique books online, but you do need to be running Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2. Here is a screenshot of flipping through Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Arundel and a close-up of Mozart’s Thematic Catalogue, which is a manuscript of his compositions in the last seven years of his life, so you can see how he wrote music.  

It uses something called Turning The Pages. A description from http://www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp1.html is:

This preview version of Turning the Pages 2.0™ allows you to ‘virtually’ turn the pages of our most precious books. You can magnify details, read or listen to expert commentary on each page, and store or share your own notes.

Go to http://ttpdownload.bl.uk/ to try it out.

It snowed! We woke up Wedensday (Jan 24) morning and saw our first snow in London. Here is a photo of our street with snow on the cars and trees.

I wish it had snowed when we were in Chamonix!  

I have posted all of the photos from our trip to Chamonix and even have a video of Cullen snowboarding, including one face plant. Don’t let the photos fool you, the skiing was terrible. One day we got to one of the ski areas (there are about 5 or 6) and it was raining so hard and so windy at the top that the woman selling tickets told us that skiing that day was a bad idea. When it didn’t rain, we had either ice, really thick wet snow, or just hard crud. At least we had some great sun at times so we could see the Alps, which are certainly impressive.

The next ski trip will probably be in Austria or Switzerland and we will stay at someplace that allows us to ski-in and ski-out. In Chamonix you have to rely on the city bus or a taxi to get from town to the ski areas and back.

I also have short a video from inside the gondola as it starts to descend from the Aiguille Du Midi peak at Mont-Blanc, which is very is steep.  

You can take a gondola ride from Chamonix up to Aiguille Du Midi, which is a peak on part of Mont Blanc. Lorie and I got lucky on Wednesday with good weather and went up to check it out. The observation areas at the top are built in the rock and the size of the mountain (mountains?) is just massive and very impressive.